The climate crisis has worsened with more record temperatures, increasing damages and scary weather patterns especially in the arctic. The city reports both progress and setbacks in reducing carbon emissions and preparing for future impacts. Recent federal announcements are also mixed, although the net impact from Ottawa appears to be increasing Canada’s contribution to global warming.
A scorecard delivered to Hamiltonians by Avi Lewis at the annual Spirit of Red Hill Valley lecture concluded that Justin Trudeau’s endorsement of the Kinder Morgan and Line 3 pipeline projects plus the largest ever liquefied natural gas (LNG) export proposal in British Columbia far outweigh the reductions from a modest carbon tax and the phasing out of coal-fired electricity generation. The latter two would lower emissions by about 23 megatonnes a year, while the approval of the pipelines and LNG facility would increase them by 270 megatonnes a year.
“The problem is when you extract fossil fuels, you don’t just put them on a pipeline and when they get to their destination they disappear,” explained Lewis. “You’re extracting and processing and transporting them to burn them, but we don’t count the emissions from burning them. We want that to be on China’s balance sheet, on America’s balance sheet, on somebody else’s carbon sheet. But the atmosphere doesn’t give a damn about where they are burned.”
The problem of promises conflicting with practice is widespread according to Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner.
“There remains a chasm between the facts and what the public understands and between government rhetoric and action,” declared Dr Diane Saxe in a report last month. “If the government doesn’t treat climate change as an emergency, then many people feel that they don’t need to either. To earn public support for serious climate action, the whole government must consistently show that it takes climate change seriously.”
In Hamilton, city staff say their long promised assessment of climate risks and appropriate responses is now underway although results won’t be public until sometime next year – more than three years after councillors asked for the report back in October 2013. In the meantime, the city’s latest update on local CO2 emissions shows a significant uptick in each of the last two years.
Earlier assessments showed a 26 percent drop in community-wide emissions took place between 2006 and 2012 and indicated that the city was well ahead of its targeted reductions. But those achievements have faded substantially – down to 22 percent in 2013 and in 2014to just 17 percent below 2006 levels.
Staff explain the changes “appear to be caused by commercial and industrial energy consumption, with residential energy consumption closely behind”, but the residential emissions are now just half a percent lower than the 2006 baseline – a sharp contrast to the 20 percent drop that had been reportedly achieved by 2012. The accuracy of the calculations is shaky since some emissions are estimated and others have never been included in the assessments.
For example, transportation emission numbers are arrived at using provincial averages of vehicle types multiplied by estimated local travel distances that exclude all highway driving. Agricultural emissions don’t include those coming directly from livestock, and the impact of consumer goods is not evaluated.
Commercial energy use in 2014 was actually higher than in 2006 according to the latest calculations, leaving reduced industrial emissions as the main remaining bright spot.
October was the second warmest in the 136 year record maintained by NASA and kept 2016 on track to be by far the hottest year yet – likely about 1.2 Celsius degrees about the pre-industrial level and dangerously close to the 1.5C maximum set at last year’s Paris climate conference. Last month, temperatures at the North Pole were an “insane 20C warmer than normal”, sharply delaying the reforming of ice cover. Antarctic ice cover was also at record lows for November and the continuing loss of mountain glaciers is imposing major water shortages in places like Bolivia where a state of emergency has now been declared.